What if the problem with social media isn’t just how much we use it, but when? A new study suggests that scrolling and posting through the small hours may be a red flag for mental wellbeing – and the effects could be as significant as binge drinking.
For the study, published in Scientific Reports, my colleagues and I analysed the Twitter (now X) habits of 310 adults and discovered that those who regularly posted between 11pm and 5am showed meaningfully worse mental wellbeing than daytime users. This finding challenges the current policy obsession with screen time limits and points toward a more nuanced understanding of how social media affects our mental health.
